QOTW #3: Is there room for a pro-life candidate in the Democratic Primary?
...and would we REALLY want that candidate
Happy Memorial Day, Readers!
Remember that if you are a paid subscriber, you can send your question to RHNQuestions@gmail.com.
This week’s question comes from subscriber, Jacob:
My question is about the lack of pro-life Democrats that run for any office and especially that of the Presidency. Many evangelicals, including myself, have a hard time voting for Pro-Choice candidates but have strong convictions about a lot of issues that they believe Democrats get right. Do you think there would be a legitimate shot for a Pro-Life Democrat in the presidential race? It seems as though candidates have gone further and further left on this issue. Also, who are some Pro-Life Democrats that we should keep an eye on in the future?
Thank you for the question, Jacob. This kind of question has consumed a significant amount of my thought over the last decade or so—and, for better or worse, an even larger portion of my public profile, I’m afraid. I’ve written or spoken about this issue in The Atlantic several times (several), and I cover it quite a bit in my book. I also have a new essay coming out for The Atlantic later this week. So I’ve spilled a lot of ink on the issue. I’ll do my best not to repeat myself here, and to offer a few thoughts I’m not sure I’ve shared publicly before.
Before I try not to repeat myself though, I will share this post I wrote on why a pro-life person might vote for a pro-choice Democrat around the Roy Moore/Doug Jones race that might be helpful, though that race was certainly an extraordinary one.
There is great deal of skepticism among Democratic strategists that there is a) any cost to moving left on abortion b) anything to gain to moving right on abortion. I have contested these ideas, and believe they were proven false in the last presidential election, and many, many other elections and political moments. However, they are not baseless.
There are a few assumptions these kinds of strategists make: 1) abortion is not really the driver for many of these voters, but a kind of cover for broader agreement with Republicans…it sounds more valorous to say you’re voting for Republicans because of the “sanctity of life,” but really it’s about the “sanctity of low taxes.” Or so the thinking goes… 2) moving to the center is not really good enough for pro-life voters who support Republicans, they will settle for nothing less than overturning Roe/banning abortion…since we can’t go there, what’s the point? 3) Any move to the right/center on abortion will depress turnout among our base.
The first point, though I think it’s a bit more complicated, is the most reflective of reality in my experience. For many pro-life folks, just dig a bit and you’ll find they also have political commitments around a range of Republican issues. Joe Donnelly’s race in Indiana was especially disheartening for me in this regard. Donnelly voted for the 20-week abortion ban. He supports Hyde. And yet, he was trounced in Indiana, facing opposition from pro-life groups in Indiana that serve as an arm of the Republican Party. Donnelly was also one of the most bipartisan senators in the country. Yet, his Republican opponent said he didn’t support Trump enough. Pro-life groups said he wasn’t pro-life enough. And a man who represented so much of what we say we want in our politicians was voted out.
Very practically, the reason more pro-life Democrats don’t run is because so often they don’t win (see Dana Outlaw’s recent run in the Democratic Primary for North Carolina’s Third District…he came in third place). They get attacked by fellow Democrats, and they get little credit from pro-life voters (and certainly from pro-life advocacy groups).
This gets us into the second assumption, and here I’d just pose the question: exactly what stance on abortion is good enough to earn a pro-lifer’s vote? Particularly if, as Jacob suggested, they largely agree with Democrats on other issues. I’ll return to this question later in this response.
It is the third assumption that I find most unbelievable and ideologically-driven. Pro-choice activists can’t argue simultaneously that today’s Republicans pose the greatest threat to women’s rights in a generation or century or whatever they put in their fundraising emails, and then also argue that if Democrats don’t support repealing Hyde (but continue to support the legal right to an abortion, for instance) that pro-choice women will have no motivation to turn out to the polls. Often, these kinds of arguments amount to financial bribery posing as political analysis. The subtext here is that unless the advocacy groups get 100% of what they want, they will not invest in electing Democrats as much as they otherwise would. This is not necessarily a dirty tactic. In fact, some might argue it’s exactly what a single-issue advocacy group should do. The problem is with Democratic elites who can’t tell the difference between advice and coercion, and with a political landscape that offers very little to balance these tactics from within the Democratic Party.
To that last point, because there are little to no significant financial interests willing or able to invest in supporting Democrats who are pro-life or more centrist on abortion, these kinds of threats are especially influential. More often than not, Democratic politicians are choosing between taking a position on abortion that will get them elected (and in the vast majority of cases, it’s important to note, a position they actually do support and believe in), get them campaign funds and get them praise and approval…or taking a position that will get them none of these things. Now, of course, we’d prefer politicians take difficult stances without consideration of the support for those stances or their own political futures (or would we?…that’s for another day), but the reality is that in order for politicians to be able to take tough votes that run counter to their party’s platform, they have to get re-elected.
To get to your specific question—would a pro-life candidate have a chance in a Democratic presidential primary?—I’ll say this: it would be very difficult. Without doing a deeper analysis on this specific question, my instinct is that it would be more possible in a year like this one, where we have 20+ candidates running. I could imagine a scenario where someone like Gov. John Bel Edwards was able to run in a crowded field, garner the support of 20-25% of the Democratic primary electorate, and eke out a win. Though it is difficult to imagine that he would be able to withstand the slew of criticisms that would come his way from Democrats that would be both explicitly about his pro-life stance, as well as attacks motivated by opposition to his pro-life stance that attacked him in other ways.
A more realistic and pressing question in 2020 is will pro-life/moderate voters offer any tangible incentive to 2020 Democratic candidates to nuance and moderate their position on abortion at all? Is there, for instance, a constituency of pro-life voters who do not want to vote for Trump to communicate to Democratic candidates that they will vote for a Democratic candidate who shows attentiveness to their concerns? Will incentives be introduced into the Democratic Primary that allow for at least one or two of the candidates to see a path forward for them if they move to the center? I agree with you that right now, especially in the last few weeks, it has been a disheartening race to the left for the Democratic candidates. In order to reverse this move to the left, Democratic candidates and strategists must be convinced that not only is there something to lose if it continues, but that there is something to gain if it does not.
We’re seeing this play out at some level right now. Joe Biden has been getting attacked anonymously, and increasingly on-the-record, for his past support for late-term abortion bans, for instance. Is there any organization, any effort, to encourage Biden to hold to that position and express support for his candidacy if he holds to his previous votes? What can you do to let someone like Joe Biden know that you’ll work to elect him if he reaffirms his previous votes? I promise you others are making promises and commitments if he’ll disavow those votes.
I’ll close this by returning to the question to pro-life voters I asked earlier in this post: “exactly what stance on abortion is good enough to earn a pro-lifer’s vote?” Is anything short of a complete ban on abortion disqualifying? If so, how have you dealt/do you deal with many Republicans’ (including Trump) support for an exception for rape, incest and the life of the mother? If you generally oppose Republicans on other issues, how is that opposition expressed if your political support is determined primarily by their opposition to a legal right to abortion? How do you balance your competing values and policy preferences in light of a political system that does not offer you a political party where you comfortably fit?
How we answer these questions will largely determine the future of the pro-life movement in the Democratic Party and in our politics generally. There are pro-life Democrats right now worth keeping an eye on: Dan Lipinski will face another well-funded primary challenger and there’s major pressure on any elected Democrat who dares to support his re-election. John Bel Edwards is up for re-election, and his re-election could vindicate his brand of politics. But for all the reasons we’ve discussed here, the most exciting pro-life Democrats of the future are little-known city council-members serving in relative obscurity, civil rights activists, social entrepreneurs and non-profit leaders. They are people who have not yet been undermined by the toxicity of our abortion politics. Pro-life voters and citizens—indeed, all who wish for abortion politics to be less absolute, less partisan, less toxic and more nuanced—carry a great deal of the responsibility for ensuring there’s a place for them in our politics when they’re ready to run for state or federal office.
Even after this long answer, there are caveats and elaborations I’d like to add for nearly every point, but it’s time to bring this one to a close. Remember, you can always reply to this email to let us know what you think.
-Michael